Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

Friday, March 07, 2008

It was a busy Friday at the 3rd floor of Torry Pines in EGLBusinessPark, Bangalore. I was toiling hard to preempt all my engagements for that day. I was supposed to catch a flight which will take me to Delhi. We have been longing about this trip for months now. We were supposed to attend the ring ceremony of our friend Vipin. It was important because he was the first guy in our group to decide to put an end to the misery (bachelorhood?). On the other hand , for me apart from attending this auspicious occasion the other important wish was to meet Puneet , the “punjaab da puttar” with a lot of literary muscles (change this ) and have drinks together. I happened to meet Puneet during my stay in Chennai. I met him over a “daaru” party organized by Ashok(Don’t search in Wikipedia for details), and almost immediately he became so close and special that every time I got my self drunk after that evening , either I have done it with him or with the wish of his existence. He is someone who has been the “Sultan-of-Spin” for my Chennai gang. Trust me , this guy is a real genius , I will not go into the details of his earthly achievements like being a great bibliophile , a great fan of music or a great cook but this is the guy who can wake you up in the middle of the night and take you out to the sea beach for talking philosophy ( well , we had this kinky code word for philosophy again discovered by the great man himself….Rule of De-icks ).

I think this introduction will not make any sense if I don’t talk about Vipin. He is my class mate from NIT Warangal. We happened to talk to each other only when we were in second year of our B.Tech. I don’t know may be our emotional frequencies superimposed quite instantly, we became friends, I think during final year , which was also marked by the staggering number of curriculum activities, we came close to each other to the point that some “others” started calling us as gays ( I do clarify , we have been straight all the way and will be in future J ). We were separated because of our different job locations. But when I came to Bangalore and started living along with him, life became a never-ending party. But the gala (neighbors called it as Gallata , the Kannadiga word for making noise) was torn apart after he decided to go to Delhi to consolidate ( this is my favorite synonym for marriage) his life.

A-grammatical actions

Now, about the flight , we were late again , we hustled our way through the security check and finally pushed our way inside it. The moment after the feeling of intoxication, that typically happens when you see the red lipstick clad lips of an Indian airhostess was settling down, we discovered a whole bunch of bald people inside the aircraft. They were everywhere , an European would possibly think that people were retuning from a “skin head” summit , a Gulti ( the sweet nickname of all Telgus in this planet , definitely not decided by their parents ) would think people were returning from their pilgrimage of Tirupati , but they were speaking Hariyanvi ( at least that’s what Saini pointed me out). Finally we located our seats and thank god we got places to keep our hand baggage overhead. The flight took off in no time and we immediately sensed the noise like being inside a general class compartment of a fully loaded train. Well ,then we decided to simplify our sorry state of affair ( typically the headache multiplied with body ache after having a long day at work) by divulging into some real “shit talking”

( I don’t guarantee that you will find a convincing meaning of this in dictionary , you might also have involved yourself something like this , typically the kind of discussions where you pretend to become a

“I know it all” and start commenting on multitude of things starting from the Budget till Breads or from Politics to Prostitution). We were guzzling every drop of fun doing this till a sweet voice broke in clamor, it was the stewardess herself, asking whether we need some water or not.Rakesh aka Saini affirmed his wish for a bottle and asked me whether I wanted one. I did the craziest thing …this is what I told him...”I don’t want to drink water from a lady who has hair color like the tail of a street dog” (Sorry for not patronizing the spending that she has committed for the same thing), Rakesh was all cracked up in laughter, so was the gal seating in front of our seat. She was laughing it loud and so enthusiastic about my comment that she took off the headphones of her boyfriend and told him what she was laughing for. (It is always a great feeling to make a female happy, because they deserve that.)

Finally we landed at Delhi airport and I could read from Sidd’s mind, Delhi is all set to become the El Dorado for us. Rakesh managed to hire a cab for us to reach Vipin’s place in Gurgaon. Till now I used to consider the misgivings about the drivers (professional) of Delhi as urban legends but this time I faced the “real” one. We faced real challenge to close the deal of paying him extra bucks for his toils(?) as we didn’t have proper idea about our destination.

Then atlast we were inside the duplex that Vipin owns in Gurgaon.

Nimboo Fry

It was as perfect as an Indian wanna be’s ( read Bachelor) room should look like. My immediate attention was drawn on the fact that this dude was living on cold drinks because all I could see was 2 litre bottles of Coke , Pepsi , Fanta and Sprite in his kitchen. We thought we will change and snooze but we were just being optimistic. Because we all felt the disruptive rumblings of hunger in our stomachs and our to add to our miseries there was no food in the house and you can’t expect a restaurant to be open during midnight in Delhi. We decided to cook, I was enthusiastic about that and started on crafting some Khichdi for dinner, we were supposed to put some potatos in the khichdi but before I put them the power went off , we made frantic phone calls to the owner of the apartment ( aka Vipin ) and located a few half-finished Candles , lit up one to continue the cooking extravaganza. Sidd worked on washing the potatos andput them inside the frying pan. It was going on good till I found out one dazzling potato on the frying pan in that half lit kitchen, the one claiming to be distinct among the darker ones immediately caught my attention. I thought of claiming the ownership of that fair potato after were done cooking, then all of a sudden the power came up and to my utter dismay I found out ………….the odd one was not a potato at all …it was a lemon that was getting fried. What a crap!! I said to my self, I got laurels from Sidd; he pointed out “You are the first cook in the entire history of gourmet to fry a Lemon” – Real “Nimboo” fry it was ….

After that feat we had to sleep as we were supposed to get up early in next morning, it was a opera of mosquitoes waiting to accompany us, though we were too tired to appreciate their presence.

Bhaiyas of Gaziabad vs Behenjis of Noida

The next morning we were taken to Gaziabad where the funeral of my friend’s bachelorhood was meant to happen. As he has already complained me that I am not happy about his marriage, I will pretend to be a “nice guy” now on and depict whatever happened around me that day and let’s hope it will be fun. The driver discovered us as first timers in Delhi and he started pointing at the places of importance, healmost educated ourselves about the existence of every Bus-stations , Temples , Gurdarwas , Hospitals and Hotels that came up on our way. He also complained about the way traffic management of Sheela Dixit’s Delhi and Mayawati’s UP differed. Finally we reached the function hall of Hotel Residency where the stage was set for a big fat Indian ring ceremony. We were served florescent colored soft drinks and we grabbed one of the round tables, we didn’t want to miss a single scene of all that happened there. Vipin was looking happy, so as his fiancé, they had to smile at everyone who turned up to wish them luck. Then came the DJ, though his existence was the oddest thing in that nicely decorated function hall, with its loudspeakers fitted with funny lights meant for an open air show, but he ensured that we revisit to some popular Hindi chartbusters and entertain ourselves. Being one of those hailing from a Tagorian Bengali family where listening to “Choli ke piche kya hai” was categorized as the most heinous crime that you can possibly commit , I mistook the skimpily clad girl dancing on the number “Babuji zara dheere chalo” as an “item” number specialist. Then the ceremony started , the elderly ladies were chanting some ritual songsmeant to be sung in this situation and playing “Dhol”, the ambience was wholesome I must say. We were told to fasten our seatbelts as the “Behenjis of Noida” ( the female friends of the my friends fiancé ) could reach the hall anytime. I saw a sudden rush of adrenalin in Rakesh’s ears turning red. Then they came in , all dressed in black , blue and pink , they were looking exotic (don’t read between lines). I was told that they have prepared for some show in the honor of the two getting engaged and there it was ....they started their ecstatic performance.It was time for all of the males present in that hall to improvise their photography skills by measuring those gyrations. I could see people being frantic in adjusting their cameras to focus on favorite destinations.

Then there was lunch and after lunch was this introduction session where Rakesh was interviewed by a lady wearing black sari. The lady pretended to be judging one of those man-hunt events, where you get to ask questions those when answered should show your personality traits. So no wonder he was asked to describe himself in one word, and he did …..The word was “Classy” ( I wonder the cliché though that “classy” and “exotic” have some logical togetherness).

At that point, my cell phone started ringing and it was none other than “Bhiayaji”, a character taken from the movie named “Haasil”, Bhiyaji instructed me to join him in CP (Connaught place). I decided to hitchhike one of the Pooja’s (the fiancé) friends coming back to Delhi.

Pinky

Now I wish to be explicit about someone in that entire exotic lot. Its none other than Pinky , well its one of those situational names you give to a person just by looking at him/her. I would rather not use the words like “damsel”, “sexy” , “dazzling” to define her presence. Just that this tall, fair Punjabi lady perfumed by the aroma of elegance was all set to put the stage on fire. I noticed the tinges of red color on her bare arm; they were enough to make me go poetic. I couldn’t resist myself to dance along with her and then claim this honor by texting to Bhaiyaji that “Today I committed the sweet crime of dancing with a Punjabi gal”.

Driven by Kunal , powered by Polaroid:

It was Kunal, who offered to drop me near ISBT, from where I would get the metro to CP. I was feeling tired like a dog in hot summer, it was a madding sun on the streets, my eyes were aching badly. I decided to help myself wearing my goggles. First time I sensed its being an utility and not another useless accessory at that instant. And of course we had a third person in that car, she was Namita. I sensed that they were classmates, doing mba , aspiring finance pros , it was nice talking with them about the fixed assets and other assets of any organization. I, like other situations, was not selling Yahoo to them but just listening to some good music that was being played in the car.

Peccadillo at Piccadilly

He has grown beard like Saif Khan in “Omkara”

He is put on weight like Benicio in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas”

He has started smoking ..yet again

He has switchedto desi Beer from Single malts

And Bhiyaji was there. After being hugged by this gentleman I forgot all my toils , headaches. He had the passport of a great night of boozing , smoking , listening to “real” music with him. We had our starters at “The Drunken Duck”. The first pitcher was the ice breaker , now we were talking about the “days” of togetherness in Chennai. We decided calling Nitesh ( aka Nikki) , another protagonist , who is currently educating himself in Barcelona. After almost three were down, we decided it was the time to breath some air. We paid the bills, peed like pregnant women and came out of Piccadilly. We decided to collect some fuel for the night from a shop nearby, satisfied our gastronomic needs by having “Meat Pulav”and then drove back to Puneet’s home in Gulabi Baag. I was introduced to this Punjabi folk single “Chamkila” in the car. I also rediscovered Saiyaan by Kailash Kher.

Now we were in Gulabi Baag , where I met Gunjit ( Puneet’s wanna be film director bro) and Kamal. I had sometime talking to Puneet;s mom and dad before being called upstairs by the man himself. There were seven of us in that 35 square feet room which was four feet high. It was a real rabbit hole, a perfect place for having a few pegs with people who are very close to your heart. Vat-69 was the name, and we were in business soon, accompanied by some kosher Kabab.

The dessert was rice and chicken curry that mummyji had cooked for us. It was a semiconscious sole of mine , half submerged in the déjà vu of the remembrances of my recent reading of the “Age of Shiva” , indifferent of the clatter of people in that room fighting over the claim of sovereignty of the differenced provinces of East Punjab , making an arduous attempt of pretending to be conscious to my own “self”. I went to bed.

Being punk at the 5 feet paradise

I always wanted to write about the people from north eastern provinces of India , Delhi seemed to have offered me of that opportunity too!! “We have a car and we have 2 hours of free time …what we can do” , I called up Kamal ( Puneet’s brother ). He suggested us to go to the Priya Market at the Vasant Bihar area , we were there in no time. It was one of those posh arcades waiting to be transformed(?) , shops around a huge fountain that does function anymore. We located couple of same kind of shops where they sell accessories that you might want to get hold of just to claim that you are a “High” person. You better guess who the proud owners of those shops, none other than the north eastern brothers and sisters, with their low rise, piercings claiming their membership in the history of Rock & Roll. Like African Americans in US , in India these are the people who are really cool, they are Indian but they are not hairy, they wear latest stuffs from UCB , RockPort or Kappa , they listen to heavy metals . One of these shops were so motivated by Iron Maiden that they were selling idols of Eddie.I felt bad about being rotund and profound for the first time.

Monday, August 06, 2007

The huge Consumer Generated Media ( CGM ) or User Generated Content ( UGC ) available in terms of blogs, social networks , public Wikis and other Internet based content stores have always inspired me to find out the answer of the following question

Can they be used to determine a trend or buzz for a specific business entity ( ex. Products like Apple iPhone or any TV soap like The Prison Break) ?

A typical example is the following blog post on a restaurant named “Mainland China”http://bangalore.metblogs.com/archives/2006/12/dining_out_mainland_china.phtmland comments from lots of blogosphere users on that post,Now the question is whether this small fragment of user generated content can act as a piece of "gyaan" which can be effectively searched and therefore seamlessly discovered on the Web?

When I searched google for "Mainland China Bangalore" or "Dining Out: Mainland China" the above mentioned page came up as one of the top results. Now this is something that the internet users do regularly , though among all the internet users only a few come up with good search phrases that ensure contextual results. The popular search engines cannot take into account the meta context information which can possibly be best defined by the intent with what the author has written a specific blog post. Possibly the title of the post can be taken as one important context for any keywords that we index from a blog.

All those important information posted by the bloggers and other CGM providers will effectively be lost if we don't bundle them with a specific context ( As. Tagging ) or make them searchable( Indexing ).

Some of us have already seen the Blog Buzz implementations , these are typically user driven classification and categorization of blogs and other UGC for better presentation patterns in search result. But definitely we can improvise context driven classification of contents and search upto a point where we can provide the users with structured information like www.wikipedia.com provides.

All these sites index blogs and provide search interfaces on them , when some of them has gone one step ahead in providing structured trend information out of the blog content. But looks like they have a long way to go.

Basically my idea is to come up with a very basic implementation that does the following

1)Crawl a set of blogs belonging to a very specific domain ( Ex. Restaurant or Movies )2)Index them in the order of business entities they primarily talk about.3)Present the information in a review oriented format on a brief , user friendly UI.

Thursday, July 12, 2007

This post is written in response to a recent blog about a major IT company based in Chennai and Hyderabad.

I think most of us, who have worked in Company X at some point of time have faced all the issues and inconveniences described in that blog and yes most of us have stated this phrase myriad times ...”Company X sucks dude”. My stint with Company X lasted for two long years and currently I am in Bangalore, working for one of the major dot com companies. I started my term in Company X during a time in Company X’s history when accessing proxies from local desktops was allowed, so as free internet access, we used get one and a half thousand bucks worth gift coupons on our birthdays, it was a very small crowd then and yes we used to feel great about the three and half lakhs fresher’s pay package that we used to draw.

But all of a sudden it started happening, free access scenarios were being banned, people got fired due to unethical usage of internet, submitting spurious reimbursement bills, misbehaving with the opposite sex etc. etc. Company X faced a huge exodus of the employees and attrition rate raised to the all time high but that was the time for mass recruitment too, it partnered in almost every job fair happening in and around Chennai, its name started coming in the print media frequently because of the huge waiting queues it had outside its recruitment events. So that small Company we were working wasn’t miniature anymore, it became a full grown monsterJ. In course of time its India operation’s headcount was numbered around 3-4 thousands and it started operating from two metros Chennai and Hyderabad.

Now if you look at the demographic of projects that Company X typically does, 50-60% of it is technical support, 30% maintenance and a staggering 10-20% is fresh development. And guys lets not be sentimental here while keeping in mind that this India operation was established due to Company X’s pursuit to cut down its operating cost profusely and that’s the way it is. But as you know that back in US Company X was already suffering from a number of legal obligations and the relation between Company X and FCC was on the rocks, all these required Company X to establish its offshore operation under strict legal clearances (I know several projects never came to India because of the same). Some of these legal issues were so intense that they could have nipped X’s India operation in its bud. So the mandate of the higher leaders was something like “let’s take the minimum risk in legal terms and make our security norms bullet proof”. When you run a technical support centre you hardly want that to come up with innovations and this philosophy in turn reduces the need of the exposure to the information broadways like internet for the employees. But I think you still have a lot to learn and perform in Company X, in terms of the materials that are available in it’s intranet, research documents by leading strategic management firms like Gartner, free access to premium online libraries, access to the code base of some of the industries’ most innovative products and others behavioral aspects like open culture and allowance of ownership taking .So end of the day it is not only a place of have-nots.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out some of my concerns on the overall corporate culture that I have observed in Indian IT industry, which is primarily driven by the outsourcing boom.

Are we learning how to separate out our personal and professional lives? Why we still look for friends, lunch mates or dinner mates or some other “mates” at work but not try to treat people as “only colleagues”?

Why we end up staying much more hours in office than we need to finish our work items?

Why don’t we measure a job offer properly in the scale of our own personal priorities and future plans? Sounds pretty awkward to me that someone’s job is stopping her to become an ideal wife …..

Why we want to listen to pirated music in our company desktops when we know that it can lead the entire organization towards huge obligations?

Why we confuse important organizational security measures as policing in our own territory?

Why someone has to feel like being “caught by a cop for drunk and driving” when a security guy asks him to show his id card?

Aren’t some of these physical securities meant for our own benefit?

Why the hell we want to bring CDs, DVDs, and USB Drives to the work? Please do a reality check on how many of you actually own non-pirated DVDs and virus free USB Drives?

Why some of us come to office on weekends only to enjoy the air condition and free Internet?

And finally I think the rule of thumb is, if you think your workplace is making you unhappy, you better quit the job and not crib like a premature …as a company has other things to consider than fostering a bunch of gizmo freaks. It’s sad but true …. I have observed that some of us even take tissue papers to home from office to save a tiny amount of personal stationary cost. This is just ridiculous, isn’t it.

Personally I would request people to be more positive in terms of understanding work culture which is very specific to a particular organization. We are burgeoning as the largest IT labor pool and we can support this growth to sustain definitely not by abusing leaders and other concerned people or expressing qualms against what we are getting end of the day but by sharing positive feedbacks and helping leaders to implement robust processes, which will finally benefit ourselves creating a better ecosystem in which we all are destined to coexist.

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Vipin asked me to define the problem …which was indeed an intimidating demand of his. Yes, how about user tuned web search or sharing the search query strings (on specific keyword) on the web, well as the web user count is increasing each and every day there is a increased need to mirror the searches that has happened on a specific keyword and sharing the web searches made by experienced web user to the newbie …isn’t that idea comprehensive enough. My idea is to have a wiki, where instead of static articles...It will contain links to different information sources grouped by different contexts and different search APIs like (Google, yahoo, technorati search and yahoo answers .Flicker photos etc.)Introduction:

Web search has become the hottest application on the wire in recent years, but the online encyclopedia tools like wikipedia still prove their success over powerful web based search engines like Yahoo or Google when a user wants to find some specific information on the web with search keywords, like “second world war” or “Microsoft corporation”. Just to give an illustration, if you search Google or yahoo for “Microsoft corporation” will return you links from web like the following ( top 10 results )

Isn’t that great, a single source for all your want to knows … you can know better about Microsoft corporation from this page than anything available on the web, as this is a very structured and globally contributed article which pretty much cover the entire Microsoft story, so now on you will always go to this page instead of doing popular search engine search.

But lets not stop here, lets take a third approach..What happens if I would have searched web using the globally shared contexts on “Microsoft Corporation”.

Now think of a wiki, which contains a log if all the searches made on specific keywords with different contexts. A place where you will find a collection of links grouped by contexts applied on the search keyword ( those linked are typically fetched by searching across the web using popular search apis like Yahoo , Google and Yahoo answer , flicker …basically a detailed snapshot of all the search query combinations available for the specific keyword ).

Gory Details:

How it works? Possibly that will an interesting question to answer at this point…

This is a new type of wiki driven by search , as said that basically creating a document here is something like this , you define a keyword on which you also create search contexts like if the keyword is a person , as Shahrukh Khan , the possible contexts will be “filmography” , “awards and nominations” , “scandals” . Then once you define the contexts, you will be given the options to choose the search channels , like Yahoo search , yahoo answers , de.icio.us tag search , technorati blog search and when you select the search channels and generate the results …you will be given control to choose the results. Now once you choose the results …it will wiki the whole thing, keyword as the document root …under that various contexts defined and under each context the links that you have chosen. Now when I say that the whole thing is going to be built on the wikipedia infrastructure …then its valid that anyone can add more contexts and refine and redefine any of the existing contexts.

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

You know what ! I committed this crime once again , another weekend ( long one as they say ...when we have three days of retire) and me in my favorite apartment with my laptop .. 250 GB load of movies ..so Sunday became a nice movie day for me! Watched 5 movies back to back! ( without a single grain of pop-corn) ..the one about which I want to talk about is “ Ask the Dust” , a Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek starrer . This was the movie I was waiting for a long time , because its about a writer who looks at people , their life and try writing things from his experiences. Arturo Bandini , the hero of the movie , is a writer by profession who is trying to put himself at a good place in American Literature. He moves to LA with the aspiration of look at the life of its ( LA ) population , the hotels , restaurants , parks , pubs , malls , streets , ghettos everything. Now , as the money left in his stash is fast effacing , he faces a real tough situation to maintain his livelihood in LA , to pay his rent , get a square meal. But he doesn't give up and he continues to do what he was doing ...sometime wrapping tobacco with toilet paper for his joint , biting the sour oranges he manages to get from the Chinese cheap fruit seller ...continues his battle till the day when is left with a nickel ...wants to grab some coffee before being bankrupt ..which lead to meet this Camelia Lopez ( Salma plays that character ) gal , a sweet Mexican girl who is the waitress in a bar and incodently she serves him some real bad coffee ...worst of its kind to spend one's last nickels on ...gets into a fight with her and falls deeply in 'Love' ( well ....I don't claim that I know the meaning of this little word ..so you can read it as the “symbolic cynical chemistry in a man's mind for a woman” )...

Now there is another important character in this movie Vera Rivkin , a Jews girl who is a fan of Bandini's column , somehow comes to meet her favorite author Bandini , who can solve her problem ...all she wanted Bandini to say that “She is beautiful” ....finally she becomes a pivotal inspiration for Bandini to start on his new novel , which eventually fetches good amount of money and fame for Bandini. Now how the Camelia and Bandini's love towards each other grows and matures and finally how the movie end should be untold here to make sure that you watch it. But I would say , with my limited knowledge about woman ...Camelia , though portrayed as a rough-tough beautiful Mexican gurl ..represents those of its kind where they breath on their submission towards a meaningful relationship and expectation from the same. Bandini , well what you can think of a nice normal human , scared to get settled , confused about saying “yes” to Camelia ,whom he loves more than anything in this world, when she asked him to marry her , quite typical of a man character , his arrogance is marked by his uncomfortable way of treating a woman ..which I really found something unusual in Hollywood heroes.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

Bangalore ..well in terms of perspiration and cynical frustration on the components of life I used to live in chennai , its much better now. The weather is really cool ..which nullifies the scope of the first and the nice apartment I am staying in ..which is also very near to my office in MG Road ( some kinda Park street of Bangalore ) made my life very smooth.But the standard Bangalorian culture is very much stereotype ..looks like everyone here likes to copy the others. You can see everyone using same kinda mobile phone , same denim jackets , same byke ..named Pulser , same dark Lipstick ...same ..lot other things ...I mean last saturday I went to this Pub called Bunker ..to check some crowd here ..I was alone ...because I didn't invited my friends ..as just wanted to enjoy the show in solitary. I was even amazed to hear that ..the PJ ( pub jokey ...its my innovation ) was playing some hardcore GodSmack stuff like .." I stand alone" ..that was good ..but you know ..I experienced the same stereotype thing when I saw that everyone was holding bottle of beer in their hard ..can you imagine ...beer in such a weather but nothing else . I thought ..I would let that be the inflexion point and ordered a large rum. I kinda settled myself at a corner of the hall ..and starting my voyeur again ...it was a huge floor ...and they have the square platforms made in the middle ..where the couples or non-stags ( I mean a group where the man:woman greate than 1 ) are supposed to stand ..and those places are elevated than the normal floor ...where standard men crowed is supposed to stand.As I was enjoying the music ..the drink reached me ...though I ordered for Coke ..( my fav. base drink ) but the guy brought Pepsi ...he begged excuse and suggested that they both are the same sir! ..go hell with your suggestion I told him ...and started my drink neat ..well in turn I requested for one of my favourite number of this time ..by the best American Band ever called Doors ..named Roadhouse Blues ...with that ..I mirrored a "cheers" to the crowed and to Bangalore and joined the gala.I mean here are few of the eye catchers ....only Bangalorians-Indians ..can dance in Amitav's style with ACDC songs ..some of the manly ones ( I mean the macho-mumbos ..not with the six packs but tummy-pot-less creatures) will catwalk in front of the gals ( of course they came to the disco with some guy ..or some group of men and women ..) in the lucrative dream of pleasing her eyes..or I dont know why..non-indians ..well well ...poor they .,.dont even know that after a Indian has had his saturday night drink ...he cannot excuZe you ..even if you say "Excuse me" myriad times ....all that went on till after grabbing my third I took the retire and started walking towards my apartment.

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Just came back from a Saturday dinner party, during the dinner ( which was great ! ) the topic just popped into my psychic vista, well I never thought about the literary validity of this oxymoron ( that’s my claim if anyone think this is not please comment ) “inscrutable virginity “ , rather it was another two lettered member those keep coming in my mind. But when I told this to Nitesh , he told that its an interesting thing to be talked piece of idea to be talked about in detail. So as now I have few free hours before I retire for bed and have a pack of cigarettes which I can finish on this ( smoke for thought ) I decided to take this oxymoron as the title of the post I am going to do after one long yearof abstinence from writing blogs.

Enough for introduction .... let me divulge the main course ; this is about the past one year of my life ; part of my life where things happened in a very fast pace , never been before , lot of people came into my life ( some of them left…some of them with some conspicuous abruptness..) , I have been to situation which was brand new to me , learnt a whole lot of things , committed a bunch of activities never thought of …well I think all these sound pretty normal as this is how the walk of life is supposed to be , but then again why I am getting the feeling that this one year is much more important than being another trivial window of time. Just that a considerable amount of my though process has been shoestring effect on my living, it does not mean that I have not taken those ideas to some logical end points. Being an uncommitted thinker, my utopia ranges from being the PM of India to dating Priyanka Chopra ( sigh …) , recently I was involved in aself assigned project of analyzing every sparks of ideas coming in my mind explicitly and found out that most of them dont have logical coherence in between , finally I took a decision after some sleepless nights that no more infringing limits of possibilities as that kills you hundred time ( minimum ;-) ) before getting erased from your mental hemisphere.

Now , three major influential factors of my lifemy laptop , my new flat in BesantNagar , Chennai and Orkut.com. My ThinkPad R51 is the coolest possible thing happened to me , in terms of entertainment apart from its major use for my research purpose , it has servedbeyond the sum of money I am going to pay till December ( that will be end of a great financial agony ). Now the flat in beachside district of Chennai , BesantNagar ( A place in Chennai where sun rises in the west ;-) ) which we took as a measure to get a place for high noise parties and improved privacy for our bachelorhood ( in here in Chennai , the direction goes ….dogs and bachelors are not allowed ..) have taught all lessons of life in the hard ways. Sometime the drainage system is screwed up or sometime you wake up in the morning and go to toilet and after pooping when your press the lever of the flush, no water comes out to flush out the dirt ( god damn shit ! ) and with sheer dismay you discover that the water pump is fubared…..now the biggest problem is English is still not the national language in India , you have to talk toplumbers and construction managers , speaking lingua franka Tamil ….that means you better be trained in acting in some pantomimes …. Well finally as we lodged several complains to our landlord who is a NRM ( non resident Madrasi …Madrasi is the alias for the mad rash Chennai-ites ) he took some frivolous approach to pacify our rage…after a lot of patchwork and turmoil it’s a better place to stay. The number three, Orkut.com ….its a great thing for me not because reader’s expected premonition of it being the good place for hunting down feminine “shikaar”s ( hindi term for Quarry ) but being the only feasible medium of keeping contact with my friends staying in other cities across the globe …as I am not very efficient in using online mediums like IM and Telephony as the ways of keeping contacts alive , for that matter the concept of leaving scraps really been working out for me.

I am going to take a break , as I am going for pee after writing for last 2 hours and left with the third last sutta ( cigarette in collegiate lingo ) and after coming back I am going to talk about the most important aspect of this melodrama , my experiences with alcoholic intoxication … so better stay tuned. (In popular soap ad break style …)